Tag Archives: phaticized work

Phaticized work : Gladhanding

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAPhaticized work is defined as a covert and often unconscious form of corruption in which organizational resources are diverted to personal ends by way of social instincts.

Phatic is a term borrowed from linguistics, where it refers to speech that serves a social function rather than conveying information. For our purposes, phatic refers to any workplace activity that perhaps appears to serve the organization’s mission, but actually serves a social function that either does not genuinely support the mission or undermines it.

Today’s example of phaticized work is gladhanding.

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More proof of the corruptive effects of phatic elements in the workplace

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transverse-selectionUniversity of Pennsylvania social network researcher Lynn Wu recently discovered a perfect example of transverse selection.

After analyzing several years of anonymized electronic communications from 8000+ employees of a tech firm, she found that while instrumental communications about practical matters drove productivity, social communications about sports and primate food-sharing rituals—like lunches and coffee breaks—drove retention during lay-offs.

More importantly, she found that these two types of communication were substitutes for each other, meaning that they can’t occupy the same network space at the same time.

In simpler terms: practical thinkers did the mission, but social thinkers kept their jobs when push came to shove.

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What to watch for in the Ebola post-game analysis : Avoiding the people factor

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ebolaWhat will we see in response to revelations that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (THPH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dropped the ball on persons infected with or at risk from the Ebola virus?

At New Gov Office, we expect to see the social factors of failure aggressively suppressed, in the all-too-typical hesitation to assign personal consequences for failed performance.

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Phaticized work – Social hijacking of workplace activities is an on-the-books form of embezzlement

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shaking handsThis introduces our series on phaticized work, a covert and often unconscious form of corruption in which organizational resources are diverted to personal ends by way of social instincts.

It’s an on-the-books form of embezzlement, because instead of shifting money outside the organization—requiring the books to be “cooked”—phaticized work commandeers official workplace activities for private ends that have nothing to do with the mission of the organization.

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